The price of the leading digital currency, Bitcoin, rose by 9.58% after the Tesla CEO announced on Twitter that his company would start accepting BTC again as a form of payment only if the crypto miners would reduce their energy usage to 50% or much lesser on Sunday Afternoon.
The tweet caused a bullish move in the market as the price of the asset skyrocketed to $41,067.74 – a high in the previous 24 hours and also the highest the price has reached in about two weeks.
The CEO wrote, “When there is a confirmation of substantial usage of clean energy (up to 50%) by the asset miners with an assurance that it will increase in the future, the electric automobile company will start accepting BTC as a form of payment again.
According to data from the Cambridge BTC Electricity Consumption Index, the annual energy consumption of the digital asset is approximately 11.33 GigaWatts. But what is unclear from Elon Musk’s tweets is how he intends to confirm the usage of energy in the mining operations.
For the market investors, this is big news as the electric automobile company has announced earlier that it would stop transacting in BTC earlier in May because of environmental concerns.
The co-founder of Luxor – a BTC mining firm that just closed a Series A funding worth $5 million led by NYDIG, weighed the statements of Elon Musk; Nick Hansen said, “I think concerning BTC, Musk is trying to eat his cake and have it. he wants to maintain his stance on bitcoin and its mining, but at the same time, wants to avoid a bad PR relating to the energy consumption of Bitcoin.”
The Bigger Picture
The comments passed by Elon Musk came when the headlines were filled with the environmental impact of the BTC mining operations.
Last week, Bitcoin was crowned as a legal tender by El Salvador as interest was shown in BTC mining powered by the volcano, while the president of Iran bans every form of crypto mining till September in the country.
Just as Iran, the Qinghai province in China released a fresh ban on the mining operations of cryptocurrency, making mention of the energy usage.
Despite these backlashes and imminent setbacks, Hasen is still very hopeful about the future of BTC mining. Currently, according to CoinGecko, BTC is trading at $38,859.56.
